Blood Diamond - Film Essay Example for Free

Blood Diamond Film Essay I agree with this view because key ideas are an important part of a film to make it more interesting for the audience. In the film Blood Diamond directed by Edward Zwick some of the key ideas are: What is valuable and important, the devastation of war and exploitation of people and resources. These key ideas in the film help viewers to understand the film better. The key idea of what is valuable is an important one in the film. The three main characters Maddy, Danny and Solomon all have something different that is valuable to them. Maddy is a journalist who travels around the world in search of a good story. She ends up in Sierra Leone to get a story about what is going on with the civil war over the diamonds but when she gets there she finds it hard to get any information about the diamond smuggling so she focuses on the welfare of the country and the people. In the film Maddy is shown to value the welfare of the Sierra Leone people. This is shown when Maddy is writing a story on her laptop and then Danny walks in. Maddy lets Danny know how important the welfare of the country is to her when she says, â€Å"Its not going to be enough to make it stop. People back home wouldn’t buy rings if they knew it cost someone else their hands. † Writing her stories does not have a big effect on the people in the western world they are too selfish to help the country out in their time of civil war. Another text I read is A Long Way Gone written by Ishmael Beah in that text the main character of the non-fiction text is Ishmael who is in the civil war in Sierra Leone at the same time as Maddy. He is a forced child soldier and he values his freedom. Another key idea in Blood Diamond is the devastation of war. The film shows how war is devastating because many lives are lost and most of the lives lost are civilians who arent involved in the war at all. An example of the devastation of war is when the rebels burst into Solomon’s village and kill nearly everyone while on their violent shooting rampage. The rebels don’t care who they shoot or how many they shoot which is devastating. Another example is the way the rebels force children to become soldiers. They steal the children away from their families and make them shoot people. They make them say the chant â€Å"shed their blood† which is forcing the children to kill. There is devastation when the rebels burst into the city and and start blowing it up and catching it on fire and shooting people in the street who have no defense against the rampage. The army try to fight back but they are outnumbered and have no chance against the Rebels. Everyone is scared of the rebels and the survivors go into hiding. A camera shot is used to show how scared the civilians are and how powerful the Rebels are is when Danny looks through a the hole in the fence and the camera shows what the scene is outside the fence through the hole from Danny’s point of view. The scene on the other side of the fence is of some army guys getting shot at by Rebels. â€Å"People back home wouldn’t buy rings if they knew it cost someone else their hands. † Maddy This shows the devastation of war. My final key idea is the exploitation of people and resources. The film shows us that children were exploited to become soldiers by the rebels. There are scenes in the film showing the Rebels bursting into villages and snatching children from their families and taken to the rebel camps. In the text A Long Way Gone children are also expiated to be soldiers for the Rebels. Ishmael was found by the Rebels and taken to a camp and forced to be a soldier or he would lose his own life. These are examples of how people were exploited in texts during the civil war in Sierra Leone in the 1990’s. Also during this war some resources were exploited one of them was diamonds. Diamonds are mined by unpaid workers who are forced to work with no benefits then they are illegally taken across the border to tother countries who then sell the exploited diamonds, one country they do this in is Liberia. Danny is a good example of taking the diamonds across the border when he stashes some under a goats skin and makes up a story to tell the authorities but it doesn’t work. With all the corruption going on in the country Solomon says, â€Å"perhaps we were better off when the white man was ruling us. This shows that since they have become republic the country has become corrupt and Solomon thinks that if they were ruled by the commonwealth they would be better off and not have war. Blood Diamond explores the key ideas of: What is valuable and important which is the welfare of the Sierra Leone people, devastation of war which is when the RUF kill innocent citizens. And the exploitatio n of people and resources which is when the RUF force children to become soldiers. Exploration of these issues certainly contributes to making this one of the best films.